Resumo de Disposable People

Most people think of slavery as a phenomenon of the past, as
something we have put behind us. In Disposable People Bales surveys
the disturbing extent of slavery in the modern world, where there may be more
slaves than at any previous time in history ? around 25 million by his
estimate.

Bales find two broad types of slavery. The old slavery (exemplified for many
of us by the pre-Civil War United States south) was based on legal ownership
and division along ethnic and racial lines. Slaves were expensive and
relationships between slaves and slave owners were often long-term, sometimes
multi-generational. The new slavery, in contrast, is based not on formal ownership
but on other legal instruments such as contracts and debts. Slaves are cheap,
even disposable, and drawn from the poor, vulnerable, and dispossessed rather
than from particular racial or ethnic groups.

These are of course ideal types and modern slavery mixes elements of both,
varying in its forms both between regions and across individuals. Disposable
People contains five case studies: sex slavery in Thailand; old-fashioned chattel slavery in Mauritania, with White Moor masters and Black
slaves; charcoal-makers on the frontier in Brazil;
brick-makers held in heritable debt-bondage in Pakistan,
through fraud and dishonest accounting; and farmers in debt-bondage in India. In each
case Bales presents the personal stories of a few individuals, analyses the
economic and political causes of their slavery, and sketches its broader social
and historical contexts.

Bales avoid sensationalism and take care with his analysis. He distinguishes
genuine slavery from mere poverty, arguing that slavery should not be confused
with anything else: it is not prison labor, it is not all forms of child labor,
and it is not just being very poor and having few choices. (Though the
boundaries have to be a lot fuzzier than he lets on.) He also avoids moralizing:
slaveholders are not all cruel and in some cases slavery is deeply embedded in
the culture ? not all slaves yearn for freedom and some may be unwilling to
repudiate debts or contracts, even when clearly fraudulent or unfair.

Common to all forms of slavery is the use of violence, overt or implicit. So
slavery requires either a failure of the state to maintain law and order or its
complicity. In each of his case studies Bales looks at the role of the legal
system and law enforcement. Failure to protect slaves or enforce anti-slavery
legislation may be the result of apathy, discrimination, or corruption;
sometimes there is more direct involvement, with the police playing an active
role in intimidating slaves and catching runaways.

Also common to all forms of slavery is a profit-making motive, though the
profits from the new style of slavery tend to be much larger than from the
older forms. Bales cover both microeconomic detail and connections with broader
national and global economies. He analyses, for example, the profits to be made
from owning a water-carrier slave in Nouakchott,
Mauritania, or running a
four-worker charcoal-making operation in Brazil. And he looks at the scale
of the profits made by the businessmen with clean hands who run slave-using
businesses at arms length and at their links to national and international
companies and markets.

This economic connection is one of the ways in which Bales urges ordinary
citizens in the developed world to act, by putting pressure on their pension
and mutual funds. Another is political action, directed towards economic
sanctions or to pressuring governments to enforce anti-slavery legislation. Disposable
People also touches on the work done by international organizations such
as Anti-Slavery International and local organizations such as the Pastoral Land
Commission in Brazil, the
mixed success of international campaigns against child labor in Brazil, the failure of a brick-makers revolution
in Pakistan in 1988, andthe
relatively successful anti-slavery programs in India.

Ending slavery is no easy task: it is certainly more complex than simply
making a proclamation or announcement (as the 1980 abolition of slavery in Mauritania
demonstrates). Bales explains that being free means more than just walking away
from bondage; to protect freed slaves from starvation or reenslavement, it is
essential to provide education, training, and psychological support to enable
them to find their own way into true freedom.

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